The Dharma Mind

This website attempts to convey how to cultivate and discover the Dharma Mind through the ancient immanent training model practiced through a Western form found in Buddhism called ‘Silent Illumination’, that originated in ancient China. Through true committed practice you can become free from the bondage of ignorance and delusion – the bondage that creates the familiar human condition. Through committed practice you can become the unfettered truly sensitive human being of wisdom, compassion and love for all that is.

Buddhism offers many ways to follow in order to fulfil this, our true human potential. The Dharma Mind way of practice is the path that embraces all of life without discrimination, cultivating that spirit of inclusiveness. Not the one-sided path of lists and formulas, like so many offer, but instead the path of learning to open up in a whole and complete way to ourselves in everyday life as well as in our formal meditation practice, and discover emotional and mental freedom through cultivating ever-developing spaciousness, stillness and insight.

This practice is to be seen as essentially taking place in our physical body. And by learning to cultivate practice in this way, the coming together (healing) and reintegration of our mind and body takes place. What was a split and dualistic mind and body becomes a reintegrated mind/body. When we are truly integrated in this way we become whole and fulfilled, and the samsaric world of becoming and suffering, that we ourselves have created, will fall away. In that falling away our true-nature, our Buddha-nature, will reveal itself. In this moment we become free to taste the wonder and astonishment of reality, and begin the final journey that will take us forever beyond the clutches of birth and death.